Compare Group

Vergelijk.nl (Compare Group) is a privately held company which holds six price comparison services in four countries and was founded in the Netherlands in 1999. Vergelijk.nl was founded in 1999 by Ben Kerkhof, Jean Paul Soethout and Tjibbe de Jong and was the first price comparison website in the Netherlands. In 2000, Vergelijk.nl co-founder Ben Kerkhof started Vertaa.fi, a price comparison website based in Finland. Business was expanded to Belgium in 2002 with the start of Vergelijk.be and in 2006 Vergelijk.nl acquired Dutch competitor ElCheapo.nl. In September 2021 Compare Group launched a new CSS in Germany named ElCheapo.de (rebranded to Bestekauf.de in August 2022). Eleven months after the launch of Bestekauf.de Compare Group entered the Swedish market with its new CSS Varusök.se continuing its European expansion. Early 2015 Vergelijk.nl launched their omni-channel localised price comparison service in which not just products and offers from webshops are compared but also those of the traditional brick and mortar merchants. vergelijk.nl vergelijk.be comparer.be vertaa.fi bestekauf.de varusök.se Compare Group was founded shortly after the acquisition of Elcheapo.nl in 2006, in order to centralize the management of the different labels. Since the founding of the Compare Group, business was expanded further to France and French-speaking Belgium with the foundation of Comparer.fr and Comparer.be in 2009. Although Compare Group provides some insights in monthly visitor amounts, it does not publish exact visitor numbers. It is known that in 2004 Vergelijk.nl welcomed its 20 millionth visitor since its founding in 1999 and passed the 40 million visitors mark in 2006. In september 2017 Vergelijk.nl and Vergelijk.be where the first CSS's in Europe allowed to participate in Google Shopping PLA's after Google was fined with a 2.4 billion euro antitrust fine. In March 2018 Vergelijk.nl and Vergelijk.be where the first CSS's in The Netherlands and Belgium to show Amazon results on its websites. Comparestreet.co.